So Kurosawa, with his period parables of honor defended and defeated, represented Japan to the West.
These days, people are more interested in Kurosawa than he is in being Kurosawa.
The exuberance of Kurosawa's imagery was matched by a vision almost comic in its bleakness.
In 1990 came a lifetime achievement Oscar and the cementing of the Kurosawa legend.
Kurosawa's epic masterpiece The Seven Samurai (1954) became the 1960 Western The Magnificent Seven.
But by the late 1960s Kurosawa's costly standards were unaffordable as color TV seduced the public.
And enough books have been written about Kurosawa and his films to fill a good-sized library stack.
Every face-off in pouring rain can be traced to the drenched battles in a half-dozen Kurosawa classics.
Championed by luminaries such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Kurosawa found finance in the West.
Know George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) and you can guess the plot of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (1958).
Kurosawa was brash in comparison, pasting elements of Western style onto the traditional visual poetry of his elders.
The kind of power that Kurosawa aims for, and intermittently achieves, in this picture is less oneiric than ceremonial.
Only the rest of the world got it and its director, Akira Kurosawa.
In 1990 Lucas and Steven Spielberg gave Kurosawa an Oscar for life achievement.
Yet he is as close as Kurosawa came to putting saintliness on screen.
But Kurosawa's most lasting influence has been on succeeding generations of Asian filmmakers.
Audie Bock, who took office on April 5th, is a Kurosawa scholar and has written two books on Japanese cinema.
Kurosawa, who kept making films long after many in Japan gave him up for dead, had that same holy determination.
Recuperating, Kurosawa was invited to Moscow to shoot Dersu Uzala (1975), a story of a Soviet army officer, in Russian.
With The Seven Samurai and other feudal epics, Kurosawa was accused of peddling the samurai tradition as exotica for Westerners.
As a young assistant director, Kurosawa attended a double feature where a foreign movie and a Japanese one were shown together.
Both Criterion and Film Forum succeeded in paying worthy tribute to Kurosawa, while tastefully banking on the heightened interest in his work.
Even Kurosawa's modern-day films were set in a landscape of mortal betrayal.
Kurosawa set out to make spicier fare that every Japanese would love.
Other recipients of the award include film director Akira Kurosawa and Japan's women's national soccer team that won the World Cup in 2011.
Hefty tomes, issued by various publishers, distributors and releasing companies in various forms of media have accompanied the Kurosawa Centennial, to various degrees of success.
As Kurosawa grew in stature, so did tales of his eccentricities.
Indeed, local audiences were suspicious of the Emperor, as Kurosawa was called for his imperious ways, and studio bosses tired of his perfectionism and big budgets.
"Kurosawa tells me to keep my own Chinese character and style, " while embracing the outside world, wrote director Zhang Yimou in a recent Time magazine appreciation.
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